by Bright,R. F.
“Seems harmless,” said Virginia.
“Harmless!?” shouted Thomka. “They’re training for real assassinations. Violent assemblies. They’re casing the whole city. They’re a threat. A real threat.”
Petey’s dismissal of these games wavered. “Even an empty threat demands a response.”
Thomka mirrored his cautious tone. “This could get out of hand.”
Petey remembered something disturbing. “There are lots of other games there, too. Hundreds of them. And they’re all weird like this one. There was one that gave points for GPS marking where fire extinguishers and heart defibrillators are kept.”
Thomka’s eyes widened. “They’re tagging our emergency supplies.”
That was it for Petey. “Better to shut this down now than find out it wasn’t just a harmless . . . thing.”
“Shut what down?” said Virginia. “A social game?”
“The whole thing. There are hundreds of games like this going on, right now,” said Petey. “And this Tuke guy is formidable.”
“Tuke?” said Virginia. “That Tuke! The Nobel Prize Tuke. Tuke? Is that German?”
Murthy rolled his eyes.
“Pennsylvania Dutch,” said Thomka, as an indictment.
“Quakers!?” she yelped. “There’s no cure for Quakers.”
“That’s reason enough to get on this,” said Thomka. “The Quakers aren’t some post-apocalyptic nut-job hippies. They don’t wear funny hats, or obey crazy rules. They’re hyper-rationalists. They think things through. They’re serious. And they’re patient. Very, very patient.”
“Look, Al,” said Murthy. “Tuke is nothing. The last game-junkie genius. I know how hard it is for you to laugh at yourself — Albert! So let me help you.” He howled, drunkenly poking a finger. “Ha ha ha! Haaaaa!”
“Better to end this right away,” said Petey. “Just to be safe. The timing is all wrong, there are some,” he paused to make air-quotes, “important deals, on the horizon.”
Virginia perked up, “Privatizing the NPF?”
Petey restrained a guilty grin to cover having cracked out of turn, and winked at her salaciously. “Precisely, my love. Privatizing the NPF.”
“This threat is not empty,” said Thomka. “The Tuke Massive has more members than The Church. They’re growing, and our numbers are in steep decline. We’re teetering on collapse, just as the post-apocalyptic mayhem is over. People outside the walled cities have reorganized. Many are self-sufficient. They don’t want to return to the old ways. Our ways. And there’re a lot of angry . . .”
Murthy exploded. “Is anyone listening to me? I have someone on this.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” said Petey. “Who?”
“I don’t know his name,” said Murthy. “I had someone in my office sub it out. He’s a contractor — used him before, that’s what they told me.”
Petey was used to overlooking Murthy’s shallow efforts, for his wife’s sake. “What do we know so far?”
Thomka rubbed it in. “Yeah! What do you know, Mahesh? You don’t have any idea where your subcontractor buddy is. Do you?”
“It’s only been three weeks,” shouted Murthy, bleary-eyed. “There’s movement. He reported in from some god-forsaken place in Pennsylvania. I have the report right here.” He pulled out his cell phone.
Thomka glared at Murthy. He was embarrassing both of them.
“Look it up,” said Petey, moving to the bar and tapping himself another beer. “I don’t like this. It’s an oddly shaped situation. It’s too simple. An underground communications network that started out as game platform. Simple ideas are dangerous.
“I started The Church on one simple idea. Crush my evangelical competitors with a fire and brimstone product with more hell and brimstone than any other in history. Way more. A lake of fire with a drop of salvation, and I’m holding the water bottle. One simple idea cloaked in a veil of love, serving up a feast of fear.”
“I got it,” said Murthy, but then he lost it and continued scrolling.
“If this spreads?” said Petey.
Thomka frowned in solemn agreement.
Murthy continued to fumble.
Virginia looked the scene over, laughed, then placed her wrist to her forehead; taking a theatrical breath, she said with a southern drawl, “I have always relied upon the . . . kindness of strangers.”
All three men fell strangely silent. This sentiment, in this context and coming from her lips, filled them with dread.
The entire Village of Lily followed as Trooper MacIan led Pastor Scott, Fred and Max toward the Peregrine. MacIan whispered, “Doors.” The Peregrine whirred and its sides slid back, allowing easy access to any part of the interior. “Who knows how to get there?”
Fred nodded at Max, who affirmed with a tenuous wave.
“You’re in front.”
Christmas broke out all over Max’s face and they settled in like first class tourists.
MacIan placed his thumb on a fingerprint-reader set into the steering wheel; the dome lowered and the electric motor vibrations sent a column of ants up Max’s spine. Fred and Pastor Scott seemed unfazed. MacIan squeezed the steering wheel and the wind-dome locked in place. He tapped a green button on the dash; whatever had been stamped onto it had worn away long ago. Lights and meters and gauges read out the preflight sequence. MacIan gave these a glance, then turned to the star-struck boy next to him. “Max? Right?”
Max nodded, eyes glued to the dashboard.
MacIan said, “Hang on,” and hit the elevators as hard as he could, for Max’s entertainment. All stomachs dropped as they shot skyward, and MacIan asked, “Which way?”
Max opened his mouth; nothing came out, but he pointed north. MacIan grinned and banked off with nose-bleed G-force. “How far?”
“Jeez. At this speed?” said Max.
“In miles.”
“Oh, about five, on foot. Like this, I’m not so sure.” Max leaned forward. “See those mountains there? The two black spires? There’s two of ’em pretty much identical.”
MacIan found the Twin Spires and roared right up to them in seconds. Max could see from this high point of view how they were anchored to the sheer cliff. “Pull back a little,” he said, pointing straight down.
MacIan jockeyed out about one hundred yards from the cliff and waved a hand at the plateau of fallen boulders. “Looks like this mountain was hit by a meteor,” said MacIan.
Fred leaned forward. “How many times I tell you that? Little shit-bird.”
“Navy man?” said MacIan.
“Drop ’em and cough,” answered Fred.
“Corpsman?”
“Fred Burdock, P.O. First Class, sir.”
“He says that all the time,” said Max, pointing to a patch on the arm of the Navy pea-coat he was wearing.
MacIan glanced at the Medic Emblem and turned a gloomy gray.
Max caught that — he’d seen it before — and changed the subject. “Around that outcropping on the left,” said Max. “By that flat boulder near the sheer wall.”
“Why were you up here?” asked MacIan.
“Hunting,” said Max, stroking his fur hat.
“You make that?”
Max nodded proudly.
“You could get a hundred dollars for that.”
Max thought about it, then frowned. “I never met anyone with a hundred dollars.”
MacIan chuckled.
“On the other side of that really pointy one. See him?” Max swallowed hard. The body looked ridiculous without the red parka.
MacIan poked at the controls and they slowly descended. At about thirty feet a heads-up display projected onto the wind-dome. MacIan did a 360-degree pivot to survey every inch with a thermal scan before dropping onto a reasonably level spot.
A dreamy whir rippled through the billowing snow as the wheels telescoped down, each seeking a different length to accommodate the uneven terrain. The dome popped open and the doors slid back. Fred jumped out,
but Pastor Scott thought twice. “I’ve seen rocks before,” he said, and leaned back to take in the celestial view.
Max ran to the body ahead of MacIan, Fred bringing up the rear. MacIan paused a few yards from the body and looked off into the horizon. “This is like a postcard.”
Max looked to see what had delighted MacIan so much, and, now seeing through someone else’s eyes, noticed the magnificent panorama he’d always taken for granted. It was absolutely spectacular. From this small plateau, they looked out over a cascade of mountains descending into the Chesapeake Watershed, where the Great Lakes make their way to the Atlantic.
MacIan wrapped his arms around himself, shivered, and said, “It feels strange standing on these humongous splinters, this wall, those spires, and that,” he pointed out over the horizon. “Makes me feel tiny.” He raised his arms to the sky.
Max was stunned. Here stood a man amongst men, a giant, talking to him as though he were an adult. A powerful man making little of himself. A man with a Peregrine. And best of all! MacIan wasn’t assuming he — wouldn’t get it. Max hated that.
“We’re like insects, microbes, on this scale,” said MacIan.
Max turned to Fred, who was poking at the body, and his face lit up.
MacIan envied the glow in Max’s eyes. He had someone to love. A luxury in good times, a necessity in bad. He had neither, and he intended to keep it that way.
The body hadn’t changed since they last saw it. MacIan turned toward the Peregrine and said, “Triage.” An ambulatory shelf slid out from its under-carriage. MacIan peeled the body away from the boulder. “Grab him,” he said. Max took the wrists, MacIan the ankles, and they lifted the body onto the shelf, which slid back under the Peregrine.
As they sped off, MacIan said, “No holes in him?”
“No, nothing like that. Not even blood,” said Max.
“Maybe he fell?” said MacIan.
A skeptical groan rushed over the natives. Pastor Scott spoke first. “I’ve never heard of anyone ever going up there. Ever. There simply isn’t anything there.”
Fred added, “No one could survive up there.”
“How about the other side?”
“The north side!” they jeered.
Fred said, “We’re a mile from the tip of a mountain and hundreds of feet above the tree line. It’s all straight up and down here, worse on the north face. The wind alone will rip the hide right off ya.”
MacIan turned back toward the Twin Spires. Once he’d found the perfect spot, he tilted the nose down until everyone had a bird’s-eye view of the whole range.
“Whoa. Dad! Look! You can see exactly where something big and round crashed into the mountain. Look!” said Max. “It’s like a gigantic, perfectly round swimming pool filled with boulders.”
MacIan leveled the Peregrine. “Back to Lily?” He could feel Max’s heart sink and it made him feel bad. “OK, then. Let’s have a look around.”
6
Thomka watched in astonishment as Murthy continued to fumble with his phone, searching for the report he was pretending to have read. “Here it is,” Murthy said, without a hint of embarrassment. “The contractor’s name is Arthur Gager. Guttenburg, New Jersey. Former arms merchant. Yada, yada.”
“And what has he found so far?” asked Petey, his patience turning colder by the minute.
“He was following a lead to an . . . associate. A Tuke associate . . . A software developer. A disgruntled employee.”
Thomka couldn’t listen anymore.
Murthy bungled on in a drunken slur. “Associate . . . money. . . twelve gold bars for the location of Tuke’s hideout,” Murthy came up for air, shamelessly. “Some kind of game programmer. A Brian Tessyier.”
“Another Quaker?” grumbled Virginia.
Thomka seized upon the Quaker theme. “Now, that is odd. A Quaker throwing another Quaker under the bus. That never happens.”
Petey agreed. “He must have reason to believe Tuke is extremely dangerous. Why else would a Quaker resort to such a betrayal?” he said, shaking his head at Murthy. “What about this Brian Tessyier? Has our man, what’s it . . . Gager, contacted him yet?”
Murthy was reading ahead as fast as he could, but it was obvious he’d not seen any of this before. “Noooo. . . He got another lead on the way to see Tessyier. It says, ‘One day detour. Well worth it.’”
“Where is this Tessyier?”
“He lives in one of our Cubes, in Pittsburgh,” said Murthy. He winked at Virginia, a victorious glint in his eye.
Virginia stood. “There’s nothing between here and Pittsburgh but mountains. Big mountains. The Delaware Water Gap. The Poconos. The Alleghenies. The ass-end of nowhere.”
“And Quakers,” inserted Thomka, watching the alarm grow in Petey’s eyes. “That’s their turf. Penn’s woods.”
“Call that guy in Pittsburgh,” said Petey. “You know the one.”
Everyone’s eyebrows arched querulously.
“You know the guy. The Wall guy. The Irishman. The one with the crazy town that runs along the Pittsburgh Wall. The one-street nation.”
Thomka paled. “Efryn Boyne? New Hibernia? You don’t want to get involved with the Black Hearts. They are not like us. They hate us. They serve us, but only for their own purposes.”
Murthy chuckled. “Thought you said they’re not like us?”
“Everyone’s like us,” said Petey. “Enlightened self-interest is everyone’s prime motivator.”
“God looks out for those who look out for themselves,” sloshed Virginia.
“We all live in our own little bubble,” said Murthy, missing the point but toasting her sentiment.
Thomka hadn’t expected things to get this ugly. “What do we do with Tuke if we find him? He’s an international figure. A Nobel laureate.”
“I want to talk to this contractor,” said Petey. “What’s his name? Gager. Have the Irishman find him. If need be, he can deal with Mr. Tessyier as well. They’re both in Pittsburgh. If we can’t find Tuke the easy way, we’ll use his friends to flush him out. And another thing. And this is important. We need the NPF. They’re respected everywhere. Why? Because they thumb their noses at us. That has to stop. We have to privatize them. We’ll confer upon them shoot-to-kill status, no questions asked, and a substantial pay hike. We’ll portray them as saviors of the state. A uniting force. They’ll become the de facto — Church Police.”
Thomka considered this Petey’s most cockamamie scheme yet. “The NPF is an autonomous force already,” he said. “They answer to no one. They already shoot anyone they want. The NPF will never cooperate. They’re worse than Quakers.”
Virginia shook her woozy head. “Fuckin’ Quakers.”
Petey’s tone turned black. “The NPF is funded by an endowment set up for them when D.C. fell. A portfolio of international debt obligations, mostly Burmese gold. A few inside deals, you know the drill.”
“Representative Daniel Burfield oversees that,” said Murthy. “Dan’s a good man. Drinks a little . . .”
“Like his liver’s on fire,” mumbled Virginia.
“We’re going to crash that endowment,” said Petey. “Representative Daniel Burfield is about to become the embezzling bastard who destroyed the dearly beloved National Police Force, just when the country needed them most.”
“Burfield’s got his beak in the NPF fund?” asked Murthy.
“I don’t think so,” said Petey. “But when the time is right, we will expose Burfield for the corrupt politician we need him to be. Then we, The Church, will swoop in and save the day. We’ll rescue the NPF. Prosecute Burfield. We’ll pay for everything.”
Thomka’s smile failed to disguise blossoming disgust.
Murthy bobbed his head in adulation.
Petey took a bow. “We will ostensibly buy the NPF.”
“It’s a thing of beauty,” said Murthy.
Petey tipped his cowboy hat and raised an empty glass to Murthy — want one? He pulled the tap and a golden s
tream of frosty beer filled the glass. “We fell into this charade and now we have to go through the motions. Make all the right faces and meaningful gestures for as long as we can. It’s politics. A show. A puppet show. So someone’s got to pull the strings. That’s what makes it a show. And do not ever forget, my friends — it is a goddamned show!”
Thomka had drifted into a sullen mood, but listened halfheartedly.
Petey pointed an empty glass at him and moved to the middle of the floor. “Gentlemen, our grip is failing. If we fumble here, we will suffer greatly. We have to grab what we can, or haven’t already put in a safe place, and move to where they appreciate people like us.”
Thomka wondered — where the hell would that be?
7
MacIan banked the Peregrine north and raked along the side of the mountain. His companions’ stomachs roiled, but they were having too much fun to puke. As they rose up and over the rocky peaks of their mountain, vertigo set in. Distortions in scale and perspective altered their faculties as the mountain melted into the foreground and the horizon broke in all directions.
MacIan poked another faded button and the heads-up display projected onto the wind-dome. Max took note of the button’s position. Details of the terrain below were projected onto the screen. MacIan zoomed in on a mile or so of tightly packed pine trees growing out of massive outcroppings and blind valleys. Not an inch of it fit for humans.
“You’re right,” said MacIan. “There’s no way up to the spires from this side.”
“This side,” said Pastor Scott, “runs all the way to Canada.”
MacIan steered in a wide arc so they might see as far as possible, until he spotted what appeared to be a small city with smoke-stack activity. “What’s that?”
“That’s Portage,” said Max. “One of the biggest rail hubs in the world, long time ago.”
“And that?” MacIan pointed to a gargantuan, zucchini-shaped object floating in the far distance.
“Airship-freighter,” Max said, shocked that MacIan didn’t know.
“Has to be a half mile long.”
“Three thousand four hundred feet. Belongs to the Chinese Factory,” said Max. “Biggest freight hauler on the planet.”
